Skytap, an industry-leading service to run IBM Power and x86 workloads natively in the cloud, today announced global expansion plans with planned availability in two additional Microsoft Azure data centers: Central India (Pune) and South India (Chennai).

Introduced in 2020 with availability in Azure’s US East region, Skytap on Azure is one of the market’s only infrastructure-as-a-service purpose-built to run IBM Power workloads natively in Azure. Since then, Skytap has continued expansion to meet increasing demand with expansion in 2021 to Azure’s Singapore, Amsterdam, and US South Central regions and in 2022 to Azure’s London, Dublin, and Hong Kong regions.

Skytap will be available in Azure’s India region starting with Central India (Pune) in April and then South India (Chennai) later this year, further expanding Skytap on Azure’s global reach. “As enterprise demand for running specialized workloads in the cloud continues to increase, we’ve seen significant interest in India,” stated Lee Jiles, SVP of Sales and Marketing at Skytap. “We’re eager to provide these enterprises with a simple and much needed path to the cloud for their IBM Power workloads.”

The accelerating interest in infrastructure-as-a-service for Power workloads is expected to continue. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, the India public cloud services market is expected to reach $17.8 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 23.4% for 2022-27.

Nearly four years since its introduction, Skytap on Azure is providing enterprises a gateway to benefits well beyond cloud scalability, agility, high availability, and disaster recovery. “Skytap customers are finding added value by connecting legacy applications to Azure native services such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), security and accelerated devops,” noted Rahul Tripathi, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Skytap. “These value enhancements further strengthen the business case for moving traditional workloads to the cloud and deliver competitive advantages for those modernizing IT infrastructure.”

“With Skytap on Azure, Microsoft brings the unique capabilities of the IBM Power ecosystem to Azure data centers in India. Customers can easily migrate existing AIX and IBM i based applications to Azure and unlock cloud benefits,” stated Eric Lockard, Corporate Vice President, Azure Specialized at Microsoft.

About Skytap

Skytap is a cloud service purpose-built to natively run traditional systems in Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. As the best cloud service to support AIX, IBM i, and Linux on IBM Power together with x86, Skytap makes it easy to evolve traditional workloads by rapidly migrating them to the cloud. Enterprises around the world like IBM, Honeywell, CA Technologies, and Okta use Skytap for production workloads, disaster recovery, virtual training labs, and application development. Skytap’s cloud environment simplifies management, reduces IT costs, speeds up application development, and allows organizations of all sizes to modernize at the pace of their business. Learn more at www.skytap.com.

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